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Bitcointalk users who logged in during the reported December 2013 DNS attack were advised to change their forum password and any other password they had reused. The incident could redirect visitors to an attacker-controlled server, creating a risk that login details and other traffic were intercepted; it does not establish that every user’s password was captured.
What happened in the December 2013 DNS attack?
On December 2, 2013, Computerworld reported that an attacker exploited a flaw at Bitcointalk.org’s domain registrar, Anonymous Speech. The attacker could redirect people who entered the correct forum address to a server under the attacker’s control. A visitor connecting to that server could have traffic, including login details, intercepted. Computerworld’s report described the incident as a registrar compromise, not a claim that every account password was stolen.
Theymos, identified in the report as a Bitcointalk administrator, gave the exposure window as 06:00 UTC Sunday to 20:00 UTC Monday. The report was published December 2, 2013; the times are stated here as reported, without assigning calendar dates to those weekdays.
The report said a Bitcointalk user noticed the change and that the domain was moved to another registrar. Theymos was quoted as saying, “These two events are probably related, though I’m not yet sure why an attacker would do both of these things at once.”
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Were Bitcointalk passwords exposed?
Passwords may have been intercepted if users logged in while their visits were redirected. The reporting supports a risk of credential capture, not certainty that a particular account was compromised or that all users were affected.
Computerworld reported that Theymos said users with “Remember me” enabled should not be at risk, and that security codes used for password-free login had been invalidated. Those were statements about the response to the 2013 incident, not a guarantee about present-day account security.
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What should affected users do?
If you logged in during the reported window
- Change your Bitcointalk password if you logged in between 06:00 UTC Sunday and 20:00 UTC Monday, the exposure period reported in 2013.
- Change the same password anywhere else you used it. Credentials captured on one service can be tried on others.
- Use a unique password for each account. A later community-maintained Bitcointalk guide recommends bookmarking bitcointalk.org and using unique passwords, with a password manager as an option; it is not an official administrator notice. Read the community guide.
Do not reuse the historical connection workarounds
The 2013 report described a temporary hosts-file mapping to 109.201.133.195 bitcointalk.org and a TLS certificate fingerprint while DNS changes propagated. Those were incident-era verification and connection details. They are not current instructions, and the old IP mapping or fingerprint should not be used as a way to access or verify the site today.
How the 2013 DNS incident differs from the 2015 server compromise
Bitcointalk suffered a separate incident in May 2015. In a May 25 post, administrator theymos said an attacker had gained root access to the forum server on May 22 and appeared to collect some or all of the “members” table. The recommended response and the potentially exposed information differed from the 2013 DNS event.
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| Incident | Attack surface | Potential exposure | Response described by the source |
|---|---|---|---|
| December 2013 | Domain registrar and DNS redirection | Traffic submitted by visitors redirected to an attacker-controlled server, potentially including login details | Change the forum password if you logged in during the reported window, and change any reused password. Computerworld, December 2, 2013 |
| May 2015 | Root access to the forum server | Theymos said users should assume email addresses, password hashes, last-used and registration IP addresses, secret-question details, and settings were leaked | Change the Bitcointalk password and any reused password; disable the secret question. Theymos’s May 25, 2015 statement |
In the 2015 post, theymos wrote, “As such, you should change your password here and anywhere else you used that same password,” and advised users to disable their secret question and assume the attacker knew its answer. He also said he did not believe personal messages or other sensitive data beyond the listed information had been collected, while noting that nothing could be ruled out. The 2015 data list belongs to that server compromise; it should not be attributed to the 2013 DNS attack.
The 2015 post also included password-cracking estimates based on a “rather powerful attacker” using then-current technology: 260 years for a randomly constructed 12-character password using all standard characters, and 405 years for six randomly selected words. These were historical estimates, not current guarantees; the post warned that nonrandom or personally meaningful passwords should be treated as broken.
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